VBT – Meditation 80.3
Through Imagination
Imagination is a great power. The guru has no power but imagination is powerful. The power of the guru is nothing but the power of your imagination, and the real guru will make you alert about and aware of your own power.
The pseudo guru will pretend that it is his power; it is your imagination, and you are free to give as much power to your guru as you decide to do. If you want to, you can give him all power; it is your projection. But imagination is a powerful faculty, the most powerful: reason is just impotent in comparison to imagination.
All that happens through imagination; nothing happens through reason. First it happens through imagination; then reason comes in and figures it out, that’s okay. Reason comes only secondary: it gives explanations, analysis, makes things clear, demystifies things, but nothing ever happens through reason.
Just the other day I was reading about Albert Einstein. He says that his theory of relativity didn’t happen through reason. He relates a very strange phenomenon. He says, ‘It happened in my body… it was kinesthetic.’ He says, ‘Obviously, naturally, I was very much puzzled.’ He could not figure out what was happening. It was something of a bodily sensation and he could not even find where to put it, how to pigeon-hole it, into what category, and what concepts to use for it.
For months he remained dismayed but he continued to search and seek to put it into rational terms. But this is very strange that he says, ‘It happened first in my body, a bodily sensation, and then for months I had to find words and language and mathematical formulae to put it in order.’
All that happens is intuitive. It is your power; please don’t bring that guru in! Nobody has power over you except yourself. You can give this power to somebody, then he has power over you.
When you go and give some power to somebody it is very flattering to him, he will not be able to reject it. He will accept it with a smile. You are falling into his trap on your own. Why should he say ‘This is your power’? Gurus have exploited people as much as leaders have… but these are not really gurus.
In the East we have two words, ‘guru’ and ‘satguru’. The guru is just a teacher, the satguru is the master. The master is one who makes you utterly free of all kinds of entanglements, who makes you really free of all kinds of bondage. He will not allow you to put any kind of projection on him; he will not function as a screen.
It is your imagination and that very imagination is telling you to go away, to do this and that. That imagination will create many troubles for you because the imagination is there, the power is there, but you are not yet in a state of meditation. Imagination becomes very destructive if there is no meditative quality around it – then it can go berserk.
The same imagination can become madness. Madness is imagination gone berserk, that’s all. Mad people are very imaginative people: they could have been great poets or painters or inventors or mystics. Many mad people have the qualities of the mystics and all the mystics have the qualities of mad people; it is the same imagination.
Imagination alone is dangerous, imagination plus meditation, then you are in the right balance. Then meditation will never allow you to go beyond the limit and it will use your power of imagination in a creative way.
Tags: Through Imagination
